A Winter Saunter

Woke up to about an inch of snow. Drove up to Wopsy--the Allegheny Front--with Silas because I knew it would be magical up there. The ice and snow on the trees were stunning.

I wanted to take a slow, leisurely walk today. A saunter, if you will. You can read about Thoreau's essay on sauntering here. The word itself derives from the middle ages where people walked the Holy-Land, asking for charity and spreading The Word. "Saint Terre" means "Holy Land" and "Saint Terre" marbled itself into "saunterer". No, Silas and I weren't walking through the snowy tunnels of evergreen spreading The Word, but the quietude and crispness around us felt very pure.

I don't want to speak for Silas, but I think he had a blast.

It was about twenty-six degrees and I didn't forget his booties today. However, they're only balloon booties because nothing else I have tried fits his huge, webbed feet. So, they don't shield his paws from the cold (I'm not too worried about that. He's a dog. He can handle some cold on his crusty, calloused paws). But I don't like the snowballs (however funny they look) between his toes and unfortunately snowballs still magically appear in his balloon booties. His claws poke through them eventually and we always lose a bootie. Oh well. It's better than nothing.

I sure do love that big guy.

We shuffled along, stopping to look at iced-over brooks, listening to birds, and examining the various fungi on the trees.

When I came home, I felt melancholic and cancelled the rest of my plans for the day. I sat on the couch, read, kind of watched football, and Brian prepared for me a foot soak for my bad foot. He's a sweetheart.

I'll leave you with something I read today.

What I learned was that the expectation of an answer runs so deep that it is presumably fundamentally human, the most characteristic trait of our nature. And what I now see is that the new virtual world that our children are growing up in is so addictive precisely because it satisfies the need for reply and response, and because it does so immediately. In this way the virtual penetrates to the core of the social and provides us with all the rewards of the social realm without requiring us to pay the corresponding price, so that we can now sit entirely alone, on our own island, without the mechanical interaction ever causing the urge for other human beings to rise within us and tear wildly about like a recently caught animal in a cage.

-Karl Ove Knausgaard

Time to play Skip-Bo with Brian.